Modern consumer and industrial electronics, especially devices such as cellular phones, smart phones, tablet computers, vehicle integrated computing and communication systems, portable digital assistants, and combination devices, are providing increasing levels of functionality to support modern life including communication services. Research and development in the existing technologies can take a myriad of different directions.
Location based applications offer a typical portfolio of services including: navigation, map lookup and display, and local business and point of interest search. These services are naturally tied together in that they are all location-based and assume that these services operate within a locale shared between a user and real-world objects of reference. That is to say that if the user is physically within the United States, then applications tend to assume that because the primary language within the United States is U.S. English, the user will want to navigate to locations named and expressed in U.S. English, ask to view maps of U.S. locations displayed with labels written in U.S. English, hear feedback spoken or displayed in U.S. English, and search for businesses and points of interest using names and concepts drawn from U.S. English. However, this assumption does not hold for everyone, for example, in the United States who is learning U.S. English or does not speak U.S. English at all. Thus, a need still remains to translate search terms from a user's native language into semantically equivalent search terms in a language associated with the data locale and insert this translation step between the search acceptance and result display stages of the search request processing.
Solutions to these problems have been long sought but prior developments have not taught or suggested any solutions and, thus, solutions to these problems have long eluded those skilled in the art.